Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday August 25, 2009 @10:18AM
from the slight-reprieve dept.

chrb writes "BBC News is reporting that the British Video Recordings Act 1984 is invalid due to a 25 year old legal blunder. The Thatcher government of the day failed to officially "notify" the European Commission about the law, and hence it no longer stands as a legal Act. There will now be a period of around three months before the Act can be passed again, during which time it will be entirely legal to sell any video content without age-rated certifications."

The whole idea of the European *Union* is that part of the sovereignty is sacrificed for something beneficial, like open borders (good for the economy), and reducing the likelyhood of war between European countries (you can think of the EU as a response to two world wars).

Not everybody is happy about that, of course, partly because the EU is not as democratic as it should be. In some countries the EU constitution was voted away in a referendum because of that.

"That "some grassroots" is thankfully very small and very ignorant of modern governance. Rather than blindly attempting to squash anything Washington is trying to do, how about you join in the debate. Maybe we'd grow an able populace that understands why a strong, central government is the best place for many pieces of legislation and pretty much all forms of regulation. Don't be a reactionary."

I am far from reactionary, I've held and argued my views for quite some time, as I learned more of how my country, the USA, was set up, I found I agree more and more with the founding fathers and the way the govt is supposed to work. It worked VERY well for nearly 200 years, but, people like you want to fundamentally change it. I respect your views, I'm happy to debate it, but, I don't agree with them, and I'll be happy to fight to keep not only keep the US from moving towards a more centralized govt. but, to go back more to our roots which made the US great to begin with.

I believe the US federal govt. as originally set up to be weak with limited enumerated powers, it the best way to go, my state govt, city govt. is closer to me, has the same interests and me, and is more responsive to mine and my community's needs.

I believe I am a citizen of my state first, and a citizen of the United States second.

What is best for someone in NYC, is often NOT the best thing for someone in New Orleans, Anchorage or Phoenix. Each region has different needs, and all our views and needs are EQUAL within the union.

Care to specifically elaborate what you think makes an argument for changing more and more to a strong centralized govt. from what the US was originally set up to be? How would a strong central govt. that interferes more with the individual's life have made us a greater country than they way we made our path until recent years?

Don't exaggerate. You also make it sound like, after the civil war, the Constitution was no longer in force. Well. It is. The United States is still limited in its power, and the Supreme Law still still reads, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The primary powers still lie with the 50 Governments, even if Congress does not seem to realize that. For examp

In These United States, the Founders set up a Federal division for a good reason... power corrupts, so split it up. And the further the government is from citizens, the less attuned they'll be to those citizens. This is why State and Local governments have been more powerful than their equivalents in Europe. If anything, Federalism and the limits on national government are more important than ever. With over 300 million people, there's simply no way the feds can ever be attuned to local and state concerns, and they'll simply run roughshod over the citizenry, as they've demonstrated increasingly over the decades.

The notion of an all-powerful national government isn't just bad practice. It is well and truly anti-American, and would be opposed vociferously be even the staunchest of the advocates of central government among our founders, save perhaps for Alexander Hamilton. And I'm pretty sure that if someone ever told Washington or Jefferson that some extra-national entity could void US laws, they'd start loading their muskets. Even Lincoln, the father of modern concentrated Presidential power would object to that.

Not really, because the nation in question - Britain, has signed up to have that as part of the deal.

If Britain hadn't signed up to this and Europe was still enforcing this you'd have a point, but as it's Britain's choice to only allow laws to be legitimate if reported to Europe then it's still a sovereign nation.

It can get out of this agreement any time it wants but there's not really any reason to as it's not a big deal. Besides, nowadays Europe does a better job of running Britain than the current Labour government does. Certainly the European court of human rights and the EU itself have done more to protect my human rights and civil liberties as a citizen than my own government which has repeatedly tried to violate them.

Even if Europe was in control of Britain then and did actively choose not to ratify laws like this it could only be a good thing until unelected Brown and his unelected cronies like Mandelson get kicked out next year.

I added this as a comment to the original submission but it didn't get picked up.

According to The Telegraph [telegraph.co.uk] this also means that there is now no copyright on DVDs. I'm not sure of the reasoning for this since copyright is supposed to be enforced by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 [wikipedia.org], but that's the legal system for you.

So, apparently the UK is now (unwittingly) running the first national experiment in the abolition of copyright and age controls on DVDs. Should be interesting!

The same thing that chickens do who sat in a tiny cage for their whole lives:You will just sit there, not knowing what to do. Until you're put back into the cage to work your asses off ("normal"), or killed to be feasted upon by large ugly beasts ("economy crisis").:P

I'm all behind the general thing you're pushing, but really, how many R rated or adulty only films (sorry, I don't know the British equivalents) go into ANYTHING relating to what to do if you don't want to become a mommy or a daddy? Heck most porns are probably bad sources on that as these days they have the whole network setup so that the actors are only supposed to have intercourse with other screened actors, which allows them to film without using condoms most of the time.

Actually quite a bit - I have several videos that are not only fun to watch, but also discuss how to avoid getting AIDS (use a condom and/or cover the pussy with plastic before licking a stranger's clit). As for myself - I learned a lot from videos downloaded to my Amiga when I was just a young lad which my uptight parents refused to talk about.

12/12A - for videos, nobody under age 12 is allowed to purchase it. for movies shown in a cinema, under twelves can watch it if they are accompanied by an adult.

15 - suitable for 15+

18 - suitable for 18+

R18 - Restricted 18 - basically porn. Can only be shown in specially licensed venues and sold only in licensed sex shops.

'E' is on some videos. It's not actually a rating, but it's just a symbol put on by video producers to specify that the film is exempt from rating. Things like videos of sports matches, musical performances, educational videos don't get rated. Most imported videos

The BBFC also now produce some text that accompanies the rating symbol which broadly gives the reason why the film is rated that way. For instance, it might say "Contains frequent strong bloody violence and very strong language" next to an 18 certificate.

They introduced R18 a few years ago when they realised that hardcore porn was mostly being circulated through the black market and by people distributing copied tapes. Of course, now, we have the new rules on "violent and extreme" pornography which actually makes it a crime to possess pornography that depicts violent scenarios - rape fantasies, that kind of stuff. With one hand, the government make porn a bit more legal, and with the other hand, they've created a new black market that the Internet supplies.

The BBFC is generally, imo, pretty fair - I mean, as fair as a bunch of censoring, free-speech-restricting thugs can be. Perhaps it's just bias living here, but BBFC seem to get it right a lot more often than the MPAA ratings do, and they are a hell of a lot less squeamish about depiction of sex and nudity - they make a distinction for 'natural nudity' where it's non-sexual, so we don't have idiotic philistines sticking big blocky pixels over DÃ¼rer woodcuts, Titian paintings and Michaelangelo's David (etc.) because they've got HUR HUR HUR DONGS LOL. There's an interesting set of articles by people who have worked at BBFC [melonfarmers.co.uk], describing exactly what it's like censoring movies and video games for a living.

Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?

The UK joined the EEC in 1973. Council Directive 83/189/EEC was passed in March 1983. It says that if a country passes "standards" it has to notify other countries.

See, the EEC (now the EU) is designed to allow freer trade between countries. You can't do that if you're implementing standards that you're not telling other people about. It makes for a "gotcha" situation: "Hey, you didn't follow the standard, and we're going to prosecute you under our laws, even though you followed all the rules you knew about."

>>>the EEC (now the EU) is designed to allow freer trade between countries. You can't do that if you're implementing standards that you're not telling other people about>>>

Well that's stupid.

The State of Utah can ban playboy from bookstores (and they have), but they are not any obligation to inform the other 49 states or the U.S. Congress about this change in law. It's called sovereignty - Utah does whatever it pleases within its own boundaries. I'm surprised to hear that the UK has less power over its own laws than does Utah, and I wonder if the EU may be exerting too much power.

Aside-

One cool example is when Delaware passed a law forbidding building new chemical plants without the DE Legislature's permission. Well just a few years later New Jersey built a new plant along the Delaware Bay. Delaware immediately sued NJ, and the NJ governor told delaware to fuck off, and so on. The U.S. Supreme Court dug-out 400 year old documents, reviewed the original charters, and proclaimed Delaware was correct - they own that beachfront. So New Jersey was forced to dismantle their construction and restore the waterline to its original appearance.

Surely, though, an EEC Directive can only govern issues pertaining to trade between EU countries? I can see how under this directive other countries in the EU could be freed of the requirement to comply (or at least, protected from prosecution if they failed to comply), but I don't understand how non-notification would invalidate the law itself.

True or false: If I, a British Subject, today sold an 18-rated DVD to a 12-year old, I could not be prosecuted because some civil servant forgot to tell Brussels tha

Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?

You call that surrender of sovereignty? Think again. The government didn't have to ask for permission to pass this law, it was only supposed to inform the European Commission. In other words: make it public, so their European partner countries know what's happening in their neighborhood. That's just common sense.

Since it refers to sales which take place wholly within the UK it has zero cross border implications. There are no important international implications - it's not like the straightness of cucumbers or whether carrots are a fruit which obviously everyone in the world needs to know.

That's probably true for this particular law, but there may be cases where it isn't, and there may even be cases where the international implications are not easy to predict. So IMHO it is a good thing to publicise laws as a general rule. Do you think it is necessary to keep laws secret?

And, it's the rule. A law is not passed if the rules are not followed. Evidence is not admitted if it was obtained illegally. Etc. It may hurt sometimes, and even seem stupid, but rules should be followed. Especially by gove

If we were only talking about a requirement that made the law unenforceable when applied to importers from elsewhere in the UK without notification, you would be right. But in this situation, application of a law domestically becomes impossible without reference to an outside party. You don't think that limits sovereignty?

I'll admit it's a subtle difference, but I don't think a country can truly be considered sovereign when its internal laws can be invalidated by a failure to notify an external party.

Can a British lawyer please tell me at what point notification of the European Commission became a requirement for an Act of Parliament to become legally binding? Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?

IANABL. In fact, I am neither British nor a lawyer. I was wondering the same thing as you - since when was it a requirement that an Act of Parliament could not become legally binding until a supranational body is notified?

A bit of Wikipediaing and then Googling turned up that: It is Directive 83/189 from the European Committee for Standardization that required this. It only applies to technical standards and regulations, not all statutes. Presumably, the requirement for notification is so that the di

The EU is designed in part to be a very close union between member states, in order to combat the extreme nationalism that predicated two major ruinous conflicts on the European continent in the 20th century. Every EU nation gives up some measure of sovereignty (although really not that much in the grand scheme of things) in order to promote the greater good.

Even having said that, though, I would argue that the simple requirement to inform other nations of standards and laws you pass is not really any more of a surrendering of sovereignty than most other provisions in any other treaty between nations.

Except it was the tories that signed the Maastricht treaty under John Major, which gave up more british sovereignty than anything else. Not saying Labour would have been any better, but it was the tories that gave up a lot of our indepenance

I thought that "independence" was a French word, but clearly it must have drifted quite a lot in meaning since king William. From New Labour to the Tories and the fucktards at UKIP, it seemed quite compatible with bending over backward to please GWB and begging for more. Now when Brussels asks you to follow simple rules you agreed to and 24 other countries have no problem adhering to, that's an outrage.What a joke.

Thats not how we do it in the UK mate. Here we make as many laws as possible, criminalizing as many people as we can. This so that when we decide we don't like them anymore there's a quick exit waiting. It also makes it easier for the police to root out the bad guys. When everybody has committed at least one crime, gives them leverage.

This was an embarressing oversight, normal service will be resumed shortly.

"Our legal advice is that those previously prosecuted will be unable to overturn their prosecution or receive financial recompense," she said.

So people who were previously prosecuted for breaking a non-law will be unable to overturn their prosecution.

It seems very unusual that you can argue that past convictions for violating an invalid law are valid, unless the Government will argue that it was an Act of Parliament and so was really legally binding, but now it is being rescinded non-retroactively and will be re-enacted in order to meet their treaty obligations. To me, that seems like the most reasonable position that is consistent with the Government's actions on this.

>>>people who were previously prosecuted for breaking a non-law will be unable to overturn their prosecution.

Jeez. More stupidity. People should not be forced to adhere to a law, or be punished by a law, that has been declared unconstitutional. "All laws, rules and practices which are repugnant to the constitution are null and void." Marbury v. Madison, early 1800s.

"The general rule is that an unconstitutional statute, though having the form and name of law, is in reality no law, but is wholly v

Claiming that Britain lacks a constitution on the basis that no-one has written it all down in one place is akin to claiming that the USA doesn't have a head of state because Obama doesn't wear a pointy gold hat.

I'm not familiar enough with British law to say for sure, but in the US I believe they could appeal and challenge the basis of the case. If the law wasn't enacted, they can't put a new one on the books and keep them in jail - it would be an ex post facto law.

My first idea in such a case would be "so the UK has violated the EU treaty, but the law is still valid".That a law can actually be invalid because of such an administrative error is surprising and I wonder what other things like this are hidden in the legalese of the EU treaty.I also wonder why a national government accepts this so easily. Do they, perhaps, hope to upset the balance of powers through the EU?

I see stories like this and wonder about the people who argue that member countries of the EU are not the equivalent of U.S. states. This actually makes them less sovereign than U.S. states, since U.S. states don't need to "inform" the federal government when they pass a new law for it to be a law.

I guess that depends on what your definition of 'regulate' and 'interstate commerce' is. New York State regulates insurance companies when they choose to do business here, even if they are located elsewhere. Is that not interstate commerce? What about regulating utility companies? How about California imposing their own standards on cars manufactured outside the state?

New York State regulates insurance companies when they choose to do business here, even if they are located elsewhere. Is that not interstate commerce?

No, it's not. That insurance company is doing business in New York and as such New York is well within it's power to regulate their actions within their state.

What about regulating utility companies?

What about it?

How about California imposing their own standards on cars manufactured outside the state?

They don't. They only impose standards that must be followed if you want to do business in their state. There is nothing stopping any car manufacturer from ignoring California's regulations when selling cars in other states.

The point of such a clause is so that every member country in the EU is notified of any regulations you have passed that affect doing commerce in your country so that they know all know about. Seems to be a rather sane idea contrary to the usual knee-jerk anti-EU hysteria that will come about in this thread. Would you like to be sued because you sold something in the UK, for instance, and didn't know they had passed some new regulation that required you to jump through some legal loophole before you could

But actually, I am quite surprised that the British government does not simply ignore this little mistake. Britain has not exactly been the model EU member with all its exceptions and vetos. At times I thought they only joined the EU because it'd be easier to sabotage it from the inside.

The Roman Republic lasted some five hundred years without criminal law. From this, you could conclude that the modern notion of criminal justice is unnecessary, even in a large society. But a look inside of Rome might change your mind. Just because the system didn't collapse without this law doesn't mean the law is worthless. It also doesn't mean it's any good, either.

When the British Video Recordings Act 2009 is passed, it will be more restrictive than the original 1984 verson. I mean, why would any good centre-right, middle-class courting, focus-group driven pack of fear-mongers pass up a perfectly good opportunity for a moral panic? Won't somebody PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!?

I mean, why would any good centre-right, middle-class courting, focus-group driven pack of fear-mongers pass up a perfectly good opportunity for a moral panic? Won't somebody PLEASE think of the CHILDREN!?

Agreed, but actions speak louder than words.

Instead of just thinking about the kids, what I do is help them with what they really need. Using my own youth as a point of reference, that typically means alcohol or cigarettes.

Giving legal advice is rather dangerous. She may have just entered herself into a client/lawyer relationship with anyone that was in the room and maybe even reads the article. IANAL so I have no idea what it implies, but it is on every single lawyer site that I read that a relationship has not been created.

I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...

I've never quibbledIf it was ribald,I would devour where others merely nibbled.As the judge remarked the day that heacquitted my Aunt Hortense,"To be smutIt must be ut-Terly without redeeming social importance."

All books can be indecent booksThough recent books are bolder,For filth (I'm glad to say) is inthe mind of the beholder.When correctly viewed,Everything is lewd.(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)

I thrillTo any book like Fanny Hill,And I suppose I always will,If it is swillAnd really filthy.

Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.But now they're trying to take it allaway from us unlessWe take a stand, and hand in handwe fight for freedom of the press.In other words,

Smut! (I love it)Ah, the adventures of a slut.Oh, I'm a market they can't glut,I don't know whatCompares with smut.

Hip hip hooray!Let's hear it for the Supreme Court!Don't let them take it away!

I have a feeling that in a "law and order" country like the US, the law would never actually stop being enforced - law enforcement and judiciary would make up something about the "spirit" of the law or some other legal nonsense.

Got a citation for that or are you just looking to repeat stereotypes about the US? It's interesting that you could condemn the US criminal justice system when we still have our right to remain silent and right against self-incrimination. Tell me, how are those rights faring in the UK? Surely they don't hold it against you [wikipedia.org] if you remain silent or compel you to be a witness against yourself [infoworld.com]?

this country has demonstrated many times that it does not care about the rule of law when it comes to being "tough on crime",

Which explains why so many violent criminals manage to dodge convictions here based on legal technicalities. It's rather apparent that you don't know anything about how the American legal system actually works and are only repeating stereotypes.

What you said, specifically, was "so many violent criminals manage to dodge convictions here based on legal technicalities." That makes it sound like we have some plague of people who are actually guilty of violent crimes using legal trickery to avoid paying the penalties for their actions. While such cases do happen, the vast majority of the time when a "technicality" gets someone off, it's because it's not at all clear whether or not they actually committed the crime, and/or it is quite clear that the e

Time-and-time again laws have been declared unconstitutional and the prisoners freed (see my previous post filled with quotes). Just watch Henry Fonda's excellent movie "Gideon" for an example which is about a real man who stood-up against tyranny, and won.

What? Hysteria? In my Slashdot? Okay I think I'm going to actually get modded down for this, but seriously, while reactions on Slashdot are often hysteric (i.e. "OMG CCTVs/Internet filtering/copyright laws, futuristic dystopia here we come!"), Slashdot has a dominantly American audience (56.5% according to my stats, +9.1% if you count Canada in), and it's just American hysteria.

Just look at how people react to news in the USA, the healthcare reform is the latest and best example of American hysteria at wo